Colleges Now Using High-Tech Warnings

By VERENA DOBNIK& RYAN J. FOLEYThe Associated Press

Friday

Sep 28, 2007 at 2:25 AM

NEW YORK | When a masked freshman came to campus at St. John's University with what police said was a loaded rifle sticking out of a bag, the school alerted students via cell-phone text messages within 18 minutes.

And when a suicidal gunman was reported to be on the loose at the University of Wisconsin, the school sent out mass e-mails and took out an ad on Facebook to warn students.

As the school year starts, colleges around the country are applying the lessons of Virginia Tech and using high technology to get the word out fast in a crisis.

"This was certainly a surprise. No one thought that we would be testing this latest technology this quickly for an emergency," said James Pellow, executive vice president of St. John's.

The 20,000-student Roman Catholic school in Queens activated its new text-messaging system just three weeks ago. The scare came on the same day that the student paper ran a front-page story on the system, under the blaring headline: "In case of emergency."

This week's incidents at St. John's and UW-Madison - both of which ended without bloodshed - underscore how campus security has changed since Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus in April.

Cho shot his first two victims just after 7 a.m. More than two hours later, he massacred 30 people in a classroom building across campus. It was not until 9:26 a.m. that the school sent the first e-mail to students and faculty. An investigative panel concluded that lives could have been saved if alerts had been sent out earlier and classes canceled after the first burst of gunfire.

Since then, hundreds of schools administrations have installed text-messaging systems.

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